Compellent Chosen by Burke Rehabilitation Hospital

For Burke Rehabilitation Hospital, having the right data available means it can provide superior care for its tens of thousands of inpatient and outpatient visits each year.

At the heart of Burke’s IT infrastructure are electronic medical records (EMR), a picture archiving communication system (PACS) and healthcare information management systems that handle patients’ clinical data, as well as billing, pharmacy, materials management and accounting. Burke CIO Ken Kupetsky needed a flexible, automated and scalable storage system to support the growth of electronic records, clinical documents and images and replace the aging HP storage infrastructure that could not keep up. Kupetsky also wanted to improve Burke’s disaster recovery (DR) capabilities, as restoring deleted or lost data was difficult and time-consuming and impacted the staff’s ability to care for patients.

After considering a number of different solutions, Kupetsky chose the Compellent Technologies, Inc. SAN as the foundation for a virtualized infrastructure with DR capabilities. Integrating Compellent Fluid Data features such as thin provisioning and automated tiered storage with VMware technology, Burke virtualized 90 percent of its data center. The Compellent SAN also opened the door to new functionality and cost savings, such as the ability add capacity as needed without downtime, monitor storage resources online and cut data recovery time from hours to minutes.

"We knew one of the keys to enhancing our patient care capabilities was to modernize our data storage infrastructure and virtualize end-to-end to ensure clinical systems such as our EMR application and MediServe are online 24/7," said Kupetsky. "The automation of the Compellent SAN saves us $80,000 annually in management costs and allows us to expand our storage or recover data in the middle of the day in a few minutes, without impacting clinicians or patients. We’re proud to have achieved EMR Stage 6 certification for our IT services, and Compellent Fluid Data was a big part of our success."

The Stage 6 EMR certification from the HIMSS (Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society) recognizes hospitals that have made significant advancements in their IT capabilities, placing them at the forefront of EMR technology adoption and use in patient care. Previously, it took hours to expand data volumes for applications such as EMR, during which time clinicians were without access to systems. Now, Burke’s IT staff leverages Compellent thin provisioning to add capacity and upgrade to new software while patient data remains online. Using automated snapshots, Kupetsky cut disaster recovery from an initial time of six to 12 hours down to 15 minutes for full restoration of the digital records systems. The decreased storage administration time has allowed Kupetsky to avoid hiring staff as well as implement IT projects that were not previously considered, such as a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) for three outpatient facilities.

Kupetsky is also using Compellent automated tiered storage software to move data between three tiers of SAS and SATA drives, depending on frequency of patient visits. Kupetsky reports that automated tiered storage has reduced long-term high-performance disk costs by reserving the high-performance tier for only the most active and critical data.

"Healthcare organizations are always striving to provide better patient care and often find that improvements to their data storage can lead to better application performance and more efficient management of critical patient information," said Matt Durkin, director of healthcare business development at Compellent. "Burke Rehab Hospital is just one example of healthcare providers using the Compellent Fluid Data solution to increase IT flexibility and manage nearly limitless data growth through virtualization, automated data management and comprehensive disaster recovery."